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Egg Balls (for Soups and made Dishes)
INGREDIENTS.-8 eggs, a little flour; seasoning of salt to taste.
Boil 6 eggs for 20 minutes, strip off the EGG SAUCE. shells, take the yolks and pound them in a mortar. Beat the yolks of the 2 uncooked eggs; add them, with a little flour and salt, to those pounded; mix all well together, and roll into balls. Boil them before they are put into the soup or other dish they may be intended for.
A garnish rather than a dish: hard-boiled yolks bound with raw yolk and flour, rolled small and poached, then dropped into clear soups or served around made dishes. The whole method rests on getting the paste stiff enough to hold together in liquid.
- QuantitiesSix eggs are hard-boiled and only their yolks used; two further eggs are broken and only the yolks beaten in raw. The whites are surplus and can go to another use.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes gives a chalky, grey-rimmed yolk. Ten to twelve minutes in simmering water is plenty, and the yolk still crumbles readily under a pestle.
- PoundingA mortar was the period tool; a fine sieve pressed with the back of a spoon, or a few pulses in a small processor, gives the same smooth crumb faster. Lumps will break the balls apart in the pot.
- The flour"A little flour" is genuinely vague. Work it in a teaspoon at a time until the paste just holds a shape without cracking; too much and the balls turn to pellets of paste.
- SizeRoll them no larger than a marble, about 1 cm. They swell slightly and are meant to be swallowed in one spoonful with the broth.
- Cooking themPoach in barely trembling salted water or a little of the soup itself for two or three minutes, until they firm and rise. A hard boil knocks them to pieces. Lift out and add to the tureen at the last moment so they do not disintegrate.
- YieldThe eight yolks in all (six cooked, two raw) make a couple of dozen balls if rolled fairly large, fewer or many more depending on the size you settle on; enough to garnish soup for a tableful.
Egg balls belong to the long tradition of soup garnishes that gave clear broths something to chew on without clouding them — the same family as forcemeat balls, quenelles and the German Eiästich of baked savoury custard cut into shapes. They turn up constantly in English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly alongside mock turtle soup, where pale yolk balls stood in for the turtle's own eggs; that substitution is traditionally given as the reason the garnish became so fixed a part of the repertoire, though it is better treated as the customary explanation than as established fact. Their appearance in a domestic manual of this kind reflects a household economy in which eggs were cheap and plentiful and the cook's job was to make a thin soup look like a considered course.